Many companies which aren't remote-friendly tend to resist hiring folks without a clear tie to their primary market for obvious reasons. If you're in Anytown, USA and applying to jobs in Metropolis, you look more like a country mouse dreaming about big city livin' than an unattached city mouse whose happenstance brought you back to your humble hometown.
Even if you've historically lived and held down key roles in a major market, the fact that you're not there now may lead an employer to believe that you're not prepared to stick out long-term assignments if the wind blows another direction. Or, worse, you're not actually as good as your résumé purports, and your last employer(s) figured that out and fired you, which led you to crawl back to the nest.
I'd suggest either moving to a major market and shooting from close range, or looking for remote-friendly roles (which would allow you to keep your negligible rent, quite a rare find in any of the top engineering job markets).
We're looking for a couple of awesome devs to join us in building a next-generation payment processing platform that blurs the line(s) between online and offline payments.
We'd love to connect with:
- a design fairy who can sprinkle some pixie dust on our mockups and sketches to produce unicorns;
- a frontend wizard who knows how to read the scrolls from the magi 'round back;
- possibly other questionable creatures masquerading as engineers.
This guy was in the unpressurized cargo hold. They didn't touch on how many times they landed along the way, except that the journey from London to Paris was so short he was panicky when the descent began. Then from Paris to Bombay is a bit longer, and Bombay to Perth is 12+ hours. If he were flying at 30,000 feet perhaps hypothermia would have been a concern, though TFA also indicated he'd seen animals shipped in just this way.
I've worked with lots of great companies, both on-site and remotely, and I can that in my experience proximity is only directly correlated with productivity at the earliest stages. Once everyone understands their piece of the puzzle, sharing a physical space hasn't been important. Remote teams work best when everyone is actually dedicated to the same cause and working toward a common goal, however the same could be said of any team.
I've built three successful teams remotely and I wouldn't trade any of them for one in a shared space. Use Slack for real-time, text-based communication, Google Hangouts for face-to-face chats, ScreenHero for remote desktop sharing (e.g. for pair programming or quick demos), Pivotal Tracker (or similar) for task tracking and weekly check-ins with every employee. If someone seems to be dropping the ball or losing focus, bring it to their attention and ask what's going on.
TL;DR: Communication is key. Not everyone's suited to remote work, but neither is everyone suited to sharing space. With the right tools in place and a dedicated team, you're all set.
Only after you've established that they have serious interest should you drop a name or two; private capital folks tend to be very well-connected with peers and likely have a direct line to any others you mention. When name-dropping a firm you've spoken to but hasn't actually expressed interest in moving forward, a casual mention can seem more like intentional misrepresentation.
You'll probably talk to a whole lot of "potential" before you find any actual "investors", so don't feel compelled to share anything until you get enough traction to be confident that things will line up the way you expect.
Even if you've historically lived and held down key roles in a major market, the fact that you're not there now may lead an employer to believe that you're not prepared to stick out long-term assignments if the wind blows another direction. Or, worse, you're not actually as good as your résumé purports, and your last employer(s) figured that out and fired you, which led you to crawl back to the nest.
I'd suggest either moving to a major market and shooting from close range, or looking for remote-friendly roles (which would allow you to keep your negligible rent, quite a rare find in any of the top engineering job markets).